Last Thursday I received a package containing something called the Nokia N950 development kit. Sweet sweet
hardware, shame it's not going to be sold to end users. The software is
visibly an unfinished pre-release version, but shows great potential. There
are almost no 3rd-party apps, which is why Nokia is loaning these N950s to
random developers.

I intend to port GTimeLog to it.
Although my more immediate need is to have FBReader, so that I can stop carrying both
this one and my N900 with me everywhere. Also, vim would be nice.

I've already hacked up Lithuanian
support to the virtual and hardware keyboards, thanks to the very nice design
of Maliit. As a comparison, I've
had my N900 for a year and a half, and I still can't type Lithuanian on it.
XKB is not fun.

The inability of Nokia to provide reliable web servers for
repository.maemo.org and tablets-dev.nokia.com is annoying. I am unable to
build packages for N810 because the apt repository that contains build
dependencies is down, and apparently has been down for a couple of days
already.

Weasel Reader had a feature:
it would display marks for all the bookmarks in the indicator line. Handy when
you're reading a collection of short stories and want to know how much you'll
have to read until the next one.

Nokia kindly gave me a developer discount code for the N800 internet tablet, a few
weeks ago. That was a very pleasant surprise. Actually buying the thing was
complicated, to put it politely. I finally laid my hands on the
device his Monday. Yum, yum!

Changes I like best: extra RAM, speed, storage space. The built-in stand.
Position of the headphone and charget sockets. Screen (shinier, not as grainy,
although I think it reflects a bit more ambient light than the 770 used to).
The ability to reorder status bar icons. New Opera toolbar. Backup
application that works without killing all other applications and entering
offline mode. New themes. Battery time estimates.

Changes I'm not sure I like: new stylus (too short). Lack of hard case
(without it I'm forced to lock the keys when I stuff it into my pocket, but the
tiny power button is hard to press). The new shape (it's harder to hold it in
my right hand while pressing the down button, which is how I like to read books
sometimes). The tearing effects when panning in Opera.

The new Media Player merits a category on its own. It indexes all the media
files (songs and videos) in ~/MyDocs and in all memory cards automatically.
That's very nice when it works. It's frustrating when it doesn't. There's no
way to force reindexing after you shuffle files around manually, and no
indication when the automatic reindexing is finished. You just have to wait
and hope that it will catch up. Also, sometimes the user interaction is very
strange: bug 1056,
bug 1063.

My sleep schedule is totally out of whack. I cannot sleep before 3 AM
(sometimes I stay awake until 7 AM), then I cannot get up before noon.

As a result I have more free time for hacking. Today I tried to play around
with Metacity's compositor, with some mixed
success. I also built a patched
FBReader with a numeric page indicator tweaked to the size and position of
my liking (screenshot). Bzr rocks for maintaining branches!

eazysvn also got a facelift today.
It is now installable with easy_install.

<rant>I do not like easy_install. It wants to install stuff into
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. That location is reserved for Debian
packages. A sensible default would be /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
or, preferably, somewhere in my home directory, with the caveat that I'll have to
set up PYTHONPATH myself. You can force easy_install to do more or less what
you want, but that involves reading tons of documentation, invoking arcane
multi-thousand line scripts, or sacrificing small animals. Not my
definition of "easy".</rant>

In the mean time, actual paying work suffers. Karmic retribution for those
three 11-and-a-half hour days I spent at work during the first week of January?
No, just lack of willpower to force myself to go to sleep (or wake up) early
instead of, for example, blogging.

We finished a rather major restructuring of the internals of a system last
week at work. I finally got to experimentally test Martin Fowler's refactoring techniques (small steps) on a
big change. It was fun and I tended to stay late at work because I wanted to
finish what I was working on. I missed that feeling. Oh, and Subversion is
good, but merging is a big inconvenience.

During nights I worked on PySpaceWar: added sound effects, support
for background music (but didn't look for freely redistributable soundtracks
yet), some visual effects, some more configuration options. And once again
playing the game became more interesting than coding it. I can beat the
computer with 100 kills to its 50-60. I should release a new version soon.

Today I discovered the cause of a long-standing problem of random reboots
of my Nokia 770. Turns out FBReader leaks file descriptors, and once the
system runs out, some important process crashes and the device reboots. A
patch and a fixed .deb are on my FBReader
page (of course I also sent the patch upstream).

Meanwhile Nokia released the N800. *drool*.
Twice as much RAM, twice as much "disk" space (flash memory, actually), faster
CPU, two full-size SD slots, interesting software updates. I want one, but
since Nokia only sells them in a few countries, I'll probably have to wait
until somebody I know can bring one to me.